HOWTO: NVIDIA TV-OUT for Newbies

This guide is inspired to Promethe's, who I really want to thank because I have managed to get my TV-OUT to work thanks to his guide: HOWTO: TV-out in Hoary (nVidia?)

My guide is aimed at newbies who want to enable the TV-OUT port of their Nvidia graphic card. It works ONLY if you have a Nvidia card and it requires the Nvidia proprietary drivers.
If you need a guide to the installation of the Nvidia drivers your can try mine:

In my case the monitor had been detected by Ubuntu as "AL1715" therefore no refresh parameters were set (because that name corresponded to a particular profile)
If your monitor already has the its HorizSync and VertRefresh leave them as they are.
If it doesn't have them then you will have to put them manually as in the previous example (you can find the frequencies of vertical and horizontal refresh for your monitor in its manual or on the internet, in the website of its manufacturer)

Now you have to add your TV as the second monitor. You have to add the following lines under the section of the 1st monitor.

If you wish, you can change the HorizSync and VertRefresh, but those values should work fine on most new TVs.

Get to the "Device" section.
Now you have to change the name (i.e. the identifier) of your primary device (i.e. your graphic card) to "Device[0]" and add the parameter “screen 0” as in the (2nd) example:
Before:

You might want to change 2 things in the example above:
1)You can change "Composite" to “SVIDEO” (according to the type of video cable you use)
2)You can change your TVstandard from “PAL-G” to “NTSC-M” or "NTSC-J" according to your tv.

If you did everything correctly you should have two Section “Device” like in the example below:

NOTE if your TV does not support a refresh rate of 60Hz you might want to set this line "Modes "1024x768_60"" as "Modes "1024x768_50"" in order to set the refresh rate to 50Hz

If you did everything correctly you should have two Section “Screen” like in the example below (OF COURSE the resolutions you have in your xorg.conf are likely to be different from mine, therefore leave them as they are):

Now, let's try it.
Plug in the video cable (make sure that both your TV and your graphic card are linked by this cable)
Log out
Restart your computer.
Then log in and you will be able to see your desktop on your TV screen (ONLY after you login). Keep in mind that it is not a clone of your current desktop. It has its own resolution and you can use it INDEPENDENTLY from the desktop you can see on your main monitor.

For example you can watch a film (in full screen) on your TV screen while writing a text or surfing the web on your main monitor.

Here's how it works:

Move your mouse to the extreme right part of the screen until it disappears from your main monitor. You will now be able to see the cursor on your TV. From there you can use the cursor to open the files you need etc.

If you need to use the mouse cursor in your 1st desktop you have to move it to the extreme left of the screen until it disappears from your TV and reappears on your main Monitor.

Re: HOWTO: NVIDIA TV-OUT for Newbies

I've run through all the listed steps in both this guide and the previously referenced one, and I never get anything displayed on my television. X loads fine, everything seems to be working, but to get display, I have to run the nvtv frontend and configure everything by hand, which ends with me having cloned screens and locked resolution. Any ideas as to what I may be doing wrong?

Re: HOWTO: NVIDIA TV-OUT for Newbies

Originally Posted by corruption

I've run through all the listed steps in both this guide and the previously referenced one, and I never get anything displayed on my television. X loads fine, everything seems to be working, but to get display, I have to run the nvtv frontend and configure everything by hand, which ends with me having cloned screens and locked resolution. Any ideas as to what I may be doing wrong?

Did you restart your computer?nvtv is automatically launched every time you boot Ubuntu.

Re: HOWTO: NVIDIA TV-OUT for Newbies

Thank you for this Howto. This has been the biggest struggle that I have had with Linux, right after Japanese input.

I have a display on my tv, with its own task bar. I am still having a couple of small problems...

One is that my autostart applications are starting and running on both screens. Any way I can get them to start only on "screen 0"?

The other problem is that I would like to be able to drag a mplayer window into screen 1 (TV), like I could in Windows. Any way to do that (or, are there any easy tricks or commands to get mplayer to open/play a movie directly on the tv?

Re: HOWTO: NVIDIA TV-OUT for Newbies

I followed the guide step by step (even went back through it a few times to make sure) but it just wont work. Whenever gdm starts all i see is a black screen. In order to get the actual login prompt to show up i have to manually change the resolution. The mouse can always go off to the right of the screen but it just comes right back on the left side. I can tell though that its trying to use a resolution of 1024x768 as the mouse is restricted to the upper left corner. I noticed in my Xorg.0.log that i get